Author loses her book deal after review-bombing authors on GoodReads

There Are No Girls on the Internet

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture, Technology

4.4 • 820 Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Cait Corrain is an author who had a highly anticipated book called Crown of Starlight coming out in May of 2024. But now her book has been shelved after she admitted to using Good Reads to review bomb a bunch of other writers’ forthcoming books. Most of her targets were Black or queer, while Corrain is white. This story has a LOT of twists and turns, including her inventing an obviously fake conversation with an obviously fake person.

Canadian author Xiran Jay Zhao was the first person I saw to bring it to wider attention online. They first noticed that Cait’s book Crown of Starlight was getting good reviews from the same accounts who were trashing other books, some of which were not even out yet.

Xiran Jay Zhao also created a 31-page Google document of screenshots showing a bunch of the alleged-but-now-admitted fake GoodReads accounts, screenshots of conversations, and other damning receipts. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1__mO1uqIqcmupBAPKwXDzlUbZIwtY6fKf0S1Y0SNz0E/edit

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Transcript

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0:00.0	There are No Girls on the Internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative.
0:11.9	I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.
0:17.5	Okay, so Mike, I desperately need to talk about what's going on with the Goodreads review
0:24.2	bombing story. Honestly, this is like probably one of the more wild stories I've heard
0:31.4	it a very long time. And if I'm saying that, somebody who covers weird wild stories on the internet, if I'm saying this,
0:39.4	you know it's truly wild. We were going to do this in this week's news roundup, but honestly,
0:45.0	I had so much to say about it that I decided it needed to be its own thing. That's because
0:50.8	it really involves a lot of stuff that I spend a ton of time thinking and talking about.
0:56.2	First of all, book communities online.
0:59.1	I don't know how tapped in you are to like online book communities like book talk or bookstagram.
1:06.2	But the drama is always very deep when it's online book drama.
1:12.5	Like, people who are voracious readers and connect about it on the internet,
1:18.5	their drama is very deep.
1:20.6	I consider myself part of that community, by the way.
1:22.7	So this is, I can say that because I'm one of them.
1:25.4	Okay.
1:25.8	This is good context to have.
1:27.3	You often tell me about very intense internet drama, and it often involves book clubs.
1:34.5	I didn't, so I didn't realize that this was like a particularly common thing of book communities, but it makes sense.
1:41.2	Oh, yes.
1:41.9	So that's part of why I'm so interested in this. But there's also
1:46.1	issues of how platforms impact marginalized people, like a lot of issues mixed up with what it
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